A partial simulation of a web based shop.
William Overington
Copyright 2002 William Overington
Monday 4 November 2002
A partial simulation of a web based shop. The web based shop is simulated as a supplier of special additional pieces for the comet circumflex board game. There is a link from this web page to a simulation of a games pieces shop. The purpose of the simulation is to simulate a web based shop where the language used in that web page is unintelligible to someone visiting the web page. However, the comet circumflex system can be used to send and receive emails to the owner of the web site and thereby enquiries about products can be made. In order that the language used on the simulated web site is unintelligible to everybody I have made use of a font which I recently produced using The Alphabet Synthesis Machine. This application of that font was not even suspected at that time, it is just a happy coincidence that, now that I wish to produce this simulation, there is already a suitable font available to use.
In order to view the simulation as intended, please go to the link below, download the font named Songs_about_Landscape and install it as a locally available font.
Some founts produced using The Alphabet Synthesis Machine.
Having done that, the simulation should display as intended. If any interested reader of those web pages would like to have copies of the pieces for this game then he or she may download them. Please think of the game as an abstract game designed as an artform. In addition to being an artform in the same sense that any abstract board game may be considered an artform, this particular game is also thought of as being an artform in another manner as well, in that playing the game and discussing it will hopefully be able to be expressed completely using comet circumflex sentences, with the hope that it can be played by email by people who do not share any natural languages.
Games pieces shop (simulation).
If readers wish to have a look at the HTML source code of the web pages used for the simulation, then that is like going behind the scenes of a theatre. What is found there is just ordinary text used as padding to make the web page display give the impression of being in an unknown language in an unknown script. The text there is almost as if actors were saying rhubarb in a crowd scene! The purpose of the simulation is to illustrate and simulate that the comet circumflex symbol on the email link is used to indicate that comet circumflex encoded sentences may be sent in order to gain further information.
The fact of the matter is that the simulated shop does not sell any products, it simply has products which are free to be downloaded by readers. However, the idea is to prompt thought in that if it were a real shop, what questions would one need to ask the management of the shop, and could those questions be codified as a finite set of questions which would be applicable to any web based shop?
For example, asking the price of an item by stating its part number would seem a fairly straightforward example of a sentence which could be encoded as a comet circumflex sentence. The website can have a part number next to a picture, so the part number could be a literal parameter of a comet circumflex sentence which asks the price of an item with a specified part number. However, maybe some practice of including information such as size and weight of each product next to its picture would need to be devised so as to help in the process of selecting a purchase. There could be various such sentences so that a quantity could also be specified if there was to be consideration of ordering more than one unit of the item.
Yet what if someone desires to enquire if a new item, perhaps, say, a piece with the number 36, could be made: how could that enquiry be made without needing to encode a comet circumflex sentence specifically for this particular shop with its particular product? What if a feature like being manufactured in the colour blue were desired? What if, for some physical product which could not be simply copied in the way in which a computer file can be copied, an enquiry for a batch of 500 units needed to be made? What if larger pieces were needed? There are then problems of expressing some of these concepts using comet circumflex sentences, unless sentences specific to the product are encoded, which specific product encoding is not something which I think is particularly desirable; for although encoding such product specific sentences might allow a fairly reasonable demonstration using this simulation of a web based shop, the method would not be directly transferable to a general case. However, what if the shop owner could specify a parameter type within a comet circumflex section of the web based shop. For example, if the number shown on the piece is something which could be customized, then maybe a way of showing a version without a number with a null symbol next to it, then a version with a number 23 on it showing 23 used as a parameter in a comet circumflex sentence which has some form of floatable parameter type. This would indicate that for that particular web based shop that that particular comet circumflex sentence would be regarded as having a particular parameter as meaning the number value to be used in customization. In some other web based shop that particular comet circumflex sentence with a floatable parameter type could have that floatable parameter type used to mean, say, the number of holes to be drilled in a piece of plastic or perhaps a choice of a type of plastic.
Thus this partial simulation of a web based shop is intended to be a simulation model for thinking about the problems involved and for wondering whether they can be solved using comet circumflex sentences.
As of the date of this document, no specific web based shop sentences have been published for the comet circumflex system. These pages are to set the scene for the simulation.
However, if readers would like to have a go at sending a message to the web based shop in comet circumflex code they are welcome to practice by sending an enquiry about the weather using the comet circumflex sentences already published.
The comet_circumflex system.
Copyright 2002 William Overington
This file is accessible as follows.